Samuel West: 'Good actors do get the roles – and recognition – they deserve’

Actor Samuel West talks about politics, his parents, – and his new TV role as
an angel.

Samuel West says he is looking more and more like his father, TimothyPhoto: GEOFF PUGH

By Daphne Lockyer

7:30AM GMT 01 Jan 2012

'Actors are generally poor and they work together. So Left-wing politics are a natural fit. It’s about collectivism and siding with the dispossessed.”

So says Samuel West who, during his time at Oxford University, was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Though more moderate now, he is an elected member of Equity’s council. “I can still get very angry about certain issues. I was disgusted, for example, by the Chancellor’s recent statement which didn’t take any extra money off the top 10 per cent of earners in this country – and even quietly abolished tax on private aircraft.”

As a teenager, he once asked his mother if she thought he’d ever grow up to be a Conservative. “She said, 'Samuel, I think you’ve already gone too far for that’,” he laughs.

His mother, of course, is the actress Prunella Scales (his father is the actor Timothy West). Sam was just nine years old when Prunella took him along to watch a recording of the comedy series Fawlty Towers, in which she played the formidable Sybil. It was a part that sent her career rocketing skywards – and still gets her recognised on a daily basis, 35 years on.

We’re meeting to talk about a television drama that could easily become a classic itself. West is starring in Eternal Law, a new series written by Ashley Pharaoh and Matthew Graham, the team behind Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes – which transformed the careers of John Simm (who played Sam Tyler) and Philip Glenister (the unreconstructed DCI Gene Hunt) in the process.

“Before those shows, those actors worked steadily, but in terms of major fame both were fairly well-kept secrets,” says West. “Now I think both of them have a big following and work pretty much all the time. It restores your faith in the idea that good actors do eventually get the roles – and the recognition – they deserve.”

As with Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, Eternal Law is a high-concept drama. It creates an alternative reality in which the audience is required to suspend disbelief. The aforementioned were a hybrid of the sci-fi and police procedural genres, in which it turned out, ultimately, that all the characters were “restless dead” police officers caught in a kind of purgatory.

Eternal Law occupies similar territory, only this time heaven is the watchword. “I play Zac Gist, a grumpy angel,” West explains. “He’s been sent to Earth by Mr Mountjoy, who is to all intents and purposes God. It isn’t Zac’s first tour of duty. He has been sent to earth many times in different guises, and angels can work in any field at all from taxi drivers to defence lawyers – Zac is here as the latter.

“Not that I believe in angels myself,” West adds. “But then not believing in talking mice didn’t stop me playing Prince Caspian in Narnia.

“Eternal Law was a similar story. Ashley and Matt just said, 'This is a world in which angels exist’, and I thought, 'OK. Lots of people believe they do, so let’s make a story about them. Just hand me the wings and I’ll do it’.”

West is an odd mixture of frightfully proper, sincere, bookish, politically right on – and one of the lads. He once concurred with Oliver Reed’s regret that he hadn’t slept with every woman in the world. When you raise it now, he laughs and says, “Oh yes, I did say that but it’s quite an old quote. Now that I’m older, I’m rather glad I haven’t”.

He is now an extremely well-preserved 45 year-old, although he says the older he gets, the more he looks like his father. “My eyes, in particular, seem to be disappearing just like Dad’s. When I look in the mirror, I’m absolutely certain he was at the conception, though I’m not so sure about my mum!”

Currently single, he muses that it would be lovely, at some point, to settle down. He has a younger brother, Joe, who, he says, has raised a beautiful family in France. “I admire that more than anything.

“He’s also managed to escape the family business. He was a great actor at school but decided to become a teacher instead. He probably got bored with all the conversations over breakfast.”

Not that West has any regrets about his chosen career. Aside from high-profile roles on stage in Enron, for instance, and on screen in dramas such as Cambridge Spies – in which he played Anthony Blunt – he is also a former artistic director of the Sheffield Crucible Theatre. “I do hope that another series of Eternal Law is commissioned but hopefully not before March. I’ll be directing a play in Newcastle then.”

He has just returned from Cape Town where he was working with his father. They were starring on stage in Caryl Churchill’s two-hander, A Number, playing father and son. “I absolutely love working with my dad because there is such an ease about it, and I also love his company.”

Growing up with actors, he says, was double-edged. “On the one hand it makes you very realistic about the business and the real possibility of unemployment; on the other hand I thought, 'Well, my parents are good… and they work’. So it makes acting for a living seem entirely possible’.”

The insecurity of the actor’s life is possibly what makes them mostly Left-wing, he thinks. Aside from politics, he has the interests of a self-confessed geek. “I’m rather proud of having been a trainspotter. I also collect stamps, I love to play board games with my friends, and I’m addicted to video games that I can play on my phone. I was obsessed by Plants Versus Zombies, but I’ve already beaten it five times.”

Over the past six years he has also become an avid birdwatcher. “It satisfies that curiously male urge to catalogue things. I thought a lot about birds while playing Zac Gist. Angels, after all, are also winged creatures of a species that isn’t human.”

The big difference between angels and birds, he adds, is that the former’s wings don’t actually allow them to fly. “They can only descend,” he says. Unlike his career, which is undeniably skyward bound.